Printing Unicode character in C
I'm trying to print the unicode star character ( 0x2605 ) in a linux terminal using C. I followed the suggested syntax of the other answers on the site, but I don't get the output:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <wchar.h>
int main(){
wchar_t star = 0x2605;
wprintf(L"%c\n", star);
return 0;
}
Any suggestions would be appreciated, especially how I can make this library work ncurses
.
Two problems: first, it wchar_t
must be printed with the format %lc
, not %c
. The second is that if you don't name setlocale
, the character set will not be set correctly and you will probably get ?
your star instead. The following code seems to work, though:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <wchar.h>
#include <locale.h>
int main() {
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "");
wchar_t star = 0x2605;
wprintf(L"%lc\n", star);
}
If you are using stdio or ncurses, you must initialize the locale as stated in the ncurses manual . Otherwise, multibyte encodings like UTF-8 don't work.
wprintw
doesn't necessarily know about wchar_t
(although it might use the same baseline printf
, it depends on platform and configuration).
With ncurses, you can render in wchar_t
any of the following ways:
- storing it in an array
wchar_t
and usingwaddwstr
or - storing it in structure
cchar_t
(csetcchar
) and usingwadd_wch
it as a parameter, or - convert
wchar_t
to multibyte string and usewaddstr